For Amao Sunday, the trouble always started with the bill. Living in Agege, a packed Lagos suburb, he shared a single electricity meter with several other households. None of them could tell who actually used what. The collective monthly charge arrived, and then the arguments began—each neighbor insisting their share was smaller than the others claimed.
Sunday’s story is a common one in Nigeria, where unreliable power and shared metering in dense urban housing have turned neighbors into adversaries over charges no one can verify. Landlords face their own version of the nightmare: tenants who bypass the main meter, vanish, and leave the property owner to haggle with the utility over debts they never incurred.
Now a Nigerian cloud platform, Vendr.ng, is trying a different angle. Instead of pushing new hardware, it is offering software that works with the smart meters people already have. Under a campaign called “Already bought a smart meter? We’ll still help you run it,” the company says customers with Wi-Fi-enabled prepaid meters for electricity, gas, or water can link their existing devices to its system. That allows remote monitoring and top-ups without buying proprietary gear.
It is a bold pitch in a market where the upfront cost of smart meters has long scared off buyers, even as distribution companies push metering to replace estimated billing—a practice that has sparked public fury for years.
Abraham Abayomi-Daniels, a project specialist at Vendr.ng, says the focus is on execution. “My role is to ensure that the entire installation process is smooth, from the initial customer engagement to full deployment,” he said. “Communication is key to a successful project.”
For landlords, the stakes are personal. One property owner, who gave his name as Mr. Obi, described years of absorbing bills for tenants who had already left. “Each time a tenant left owing, I was the one negotiating with the utility company over a bill I didn’t rack up,” he said. “Disconnections and reconnections came with their own fees, and it kept eating into my revenue.”
He switched to a sub-metering system, where each unit is billed separately, and the disputes stopped almost overnight. “I kept waiting to sort it out, but waiting only cost me more,” he said.
Analysts point out that software-based fixes like Vendr.ng’s have a clear advantage: a low barrier to entry. At a time when Nigerian households are wary of extra spending on utilities, already squeezed by inflation and currency devaluation, the ability to use existing equipment matters.
Whether such platforms can reduce disputes on a large scale, especially in Nigeria’s sprawling informal housing sector, remains an open question. But for residents like Sunday and landlords like Obi, the move away from shared, unmonitored billing has already changed how they experience something many people take for granted: simply turning on a light.
